Abstract
§13 of Principia Ethica contains G. E. Moore’s most famous open question arguments (OQAs). Several of Moore’s contemporaries defended various forms of metaethical nonnaturalism—a doctrine Moore himself endorsed—by appeal to OQAs. Some contemporary cognitivists embrace the force of Moore’s OQAs against metaethical naturalism. And those who posit noncognitivist meaning components of ethical terms have traditionally used OQAs to fuel their own emotivist, prescriptivist, and expressivist metaethical programs. Despite this influence, Moore’s OQAs have been ridiculed in recent decades. Their deployment has been labeled “accident prone,” “simple to dismiss,” and just plain invalid. Critics accuse Moore of begging the question. Others argue that his OQAs founder upon the paradox of analysis. And still others argue that Moore’s open question argumentation is incompatible with the Kripke–Putnam causal theory of reference and thus it “simply fails; it is bankrupt”. I aim to show that there is something of continuing value in Moore’s open question efforts. I present and criticize Nicholas Sturgeon’s influential interpretation of Moore’s OQAs as a means to motivate and explicate my own interpretation of Moore’s thoughts in §13 of Principia Ethica. I then articulate the role that OQAs are intended to play in Moore’s overall argumentative strategies to undermine metaethical naturalism and thereby provide some theoretical support for metaethical nonnaturalism. Finally, I attend to the most prominent objections to Moore’s theorizing and attempt to evaluate the extent to which Moore’s efforts are successful. My hope is to display both the promising portions of Moore’s metaethical argumentation in Principia Ethica as well as its limitations.
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Notes
Some might take issue with the plural arguments in Moore’s OQAs, because many refer to Moore’s open question efforts merely as his open question argument. I aim to show in upcoming sections that Moore—despite his laudable efforts—is nowhere as clear as he might have been in his “open question” passages. Furthermore, several distinct arguments can be extracted from his famous “open question” passages in §13 of Principia Ethica. See Feldman (2005) for a discussion of these issues. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out to me.
Ross (1930: 8, 92–94), and his (1939: 27); the concluding chapter of Broad’s (1930); Broad and Broad (1985: 265f); and Ewing (1953: 90f). Bertrand Russell too found the OQAs persuasive, for he admits that he does not disagree with anything in Chapter I of Principia Ethica. See Russell (1903) and (1904)—reviews of Principia Ethica—for details. Also see Kolnai (1980) for a slightly more contemporary metaethical nonnaturalist who has been influenced by Moore’s OQAs.
Moore was unsuccessful in early attempts to articulate this view and to distinguish natural properties from nonnatural properties. Moore admits as much on p. 13 of his “Preface to the 2nd Edition” of Principia Ethica: “But my attempts to define ‘natural property’ are hopelessly confused,” implying that his attempts to distinguish natural from nonnatural properties are equally confused. Moore revisits this distinction (using different terminology) in his (1922) and his response to C. D. Broad in Moore (1968). Thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out to me.
Ayer uses an OQA to motivate emotivism in Ayer (1952): 104f. While disputing that Moore’s OQAs entail the impossibility of analytic reductions of fundamental ethical terms, Stevenson uses an OQA to establish that there is an emotive meaning component of such terms that cannot be captured by their analytic definitions; see Stevenson (1944: 272f) and his (1963: 15, 30, 134). Hare adopts an altered version of an OQA to bolster a prescriptivist metaethical program in his (1952: 81–92). And recent writers use Moore’s OQAs to defend metaethical quasi-realism and metaethical expressivism from naturalistic attacks. See Blackburn (1984: 167–171), and his (1998: 14f). Also see Gibbard (1984: 200–206), as well as his (1985: 6), and his (1990: 11, 16–17, 19–22, 118, and 186).
The view that Moore’s OQAs are question-begging gained popularity with Frankena’s influential (1939); see especially pp. 469–474.
C.H. Langford seems to be the first to lodge this objection against Moore’s “open question” strategies in his 1942.
‘Pleasure’ is a tricky word that is commonly used to refer to a variety of different things. Unfortunately, both Moore and Sturgeon use it on occasion to refer to a certain property (or notion) that I would prefer to call ‘pleasantness’. But I will stick with their nomenclature—for now.
The astute scholar will notice close conceptual similarities between my discussion of Sturgeon’s interpretation of Moore’s OQAs and Fred Feldman’s discussion of the same interpretation in Section 4 of Feldman (2005). Section 3 of this essay is also conceptually similar in salient respects to the latter half of Section 6 and Section 7 of Feldman (2005). There are good reasons for this. Fred Feldman and I worked on our “open question” projects together in the early 2000s. Together we developed interpretations, criticisms, and arguments about Moore’s OQAs. Feldman acknowledges this in his 2005, where he writes: “I had the pleasure of discussing the topics of this paper on many occasions with Jean-Paul Vessel. Many of the ideas I here present can be found in Jean-Paul's dissertation, which I had the honor of directing. At this late date it is hard to determine whether I learned these things from Jean-Paul, or whether it was the other way around, or whether they just emerged in conversation. In any case, I am very grateful to Jean-Paul for his generous contribution to my understanding of OQA, even if I am not entirely clear about the precise boundaries of that contribution." (40). I share Feldman's sentiments and am tremendously grateful for his contributions to this project.” In what follows, I will note the similarities between the interpretations and dialectical moves made in this essay and those Feldman makes in his 2005. I will also note where the two projects diverge in significant ways.
Cf. Feldman (2005): 26–27.
My argumentation here closely parallels that in Feldman (2005): 27–28.
Roger Hancock seems to be the first to construct an “open question” argument with “property-identity” statements playing prominent roles in the central premises; see his 1960: 329f. But Hancock, unlike Sturgeon, presents his interpretation of Moore’s argument in an attempt to nail down the notion of a significant question that Moore makes use of in an OQA in the first subsection of §13 of Principia Ethica. Furthermore, Hancock’s “property-identity” statements are completely different in form, and substance, from Sturgeon’s. Hancock interprets Moore as doubting whether two different predicates designate (or express) the same property in certain sentences—a much more charitable and potentially accurate interpretation of Moore’s thoughts.
Cf. Feldman (2005): 27.
Here my discussion diverges from Feldman (2005) in subtle ways.
See the last sentence of subsection (1) of §13 in Principia Ethica where Moore presents his “doubting” OQA. For further justification, see Moore’s influential “The Nature of Judgment” (1899), where he presents an account of mind-independent concepts that can be combined to form propositions. And these propositions, Moore suggests, are capable of playing the role of mind-independent objects of thought.
Again, cf. Feldman (2005): 27.
Perhaps Sturgeon would choose this place to dig in his heels. Following Carnap (1947) and Quine (1964), we might construct property-referring terms from open sentences in the following way. Take the predicate ‘x is a brother’, for example. We can use a lambda operator (or an abstraction operator), to construct a name for the intension of the predicate from the open sentence that I am using as the name of the predicate: λx(x is a brother). The same procedure can be used to construct a name for the predicate ‘x is a male sibling’: λx(x is a male sibling). Sturgeon might argue that since the two property-referring terms were canonically formed from predicates identical in meaning, they too must be identical in meaning. We might then interpret Sturgeon as arguing “down” from differences in meaning between the two property-referring terms to differences in meaning between the two predicates. But, again, these inferences must be justified by independent arguments.
See Baldwin (1990): 41–50. Baldwin argues that Moore endorses a “one-level conception of meaning” in Moore’s “Nature of Judgment” (1899) and “Identity” (1901), a conception of meaning that does not posit anything like Frege’s theory of sense and reference. Feldman (2005) does not address this objection. Thanks to an anonymous referee for bringing this challenge to my attention.
Thanks to Mark Walker for assistance in developing this response.
But see Durrant (1970) for problems with Moore’s argumentation even if we grant him a two-level theory of meaning of some sort.
This amounts to a metaethical version of Benthamic hedonism: “Now, pleasure is in itself a good: nay, even setting aside immunity from pain, the only good: pain is in itself an evil; and, indeed, without exception, the only evil; or else the words good and evil have no meaning. And this is alike true of every sort of pain, and of every sort of pleasure.” From Jeremy Bentham’s (1789) introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. (Chapter X, § 2, paragraph X.).
Moore held what might be called “the distinctive feeling” view of pleasure: the view that pleasures are certain feelings that may differ in intensity and duration but are phenomenologically uniform. To experience a pleasure, on this view, is to experience the so-called distinctive feeling of pleasure to some intensity, for some duration.
I do not, at present, have an analysis for the half-empty schema: Term, t, is the nominative counterpart of predicate, P, iff…. But I do have an intuitive idea about how these nominative counterparts of predicates are supposed to work. Consider the following questions:
Is water wet?
Is chocolate tasty?
Is sugar sweet?
I believe the terms ‘water’, ‘chocolate’, and ‘sugar’ to be the nominative counterparts of the predicates ‘x is water’, ‘x is chocolate’, and ‘x is sugar’, respectively. Nominative counterparts of predicates “refer” to the items that fall under the extension of the relevant predicate. Thus, the “water” question above asks whether the extension of ‘x is water’ is a subset of the extension of ‘x is wet’. Similar interpretations are available for the other two questions.
This is labeled the “Self-Predication” interpretation of Moore’s OQAs in Feldman (2005). The referents of some property-referring terms instantiate the properties they pick out; some do not: Solidity is not solid; abstractness is abstract; the property of being easy to analyze may or may not be easy to analyze. Cf. Darwall et al. (1992) and Altman (2004), proponents of this Self-Predication interpretation. See Section 5 of Feldman (2005) for a critical discussion of this interpretation.
My interpretation also seems to be consonant with the following quotation located in Moore’s preface to the projected but never published second edition of Principia Ethica:
[W]hat I really mean to assert is that G is not identical with any predicate of this particular class, or that propositions which assert of predicates of this class, that what has them has G, are non-tautologous. They suggest, in fact, that G is not identical with any predicates, which are, in a certain respect, like ‘is a state of pleasure’ and ‘is desired’—that it is not identical with any predicates of this sort… (1993b: 11)
Feldman (2005) also appeals to this passage in an effort to provide a charitable interpretation of Moore’s original questions.
Interestingly, the phrase ‘open question’ doesn’t occur in what is considered Moore’s most famous “open question” passages: §13 of Principia Ethica. Rather, the phrase is introduced in the last sentence of §14:
For we shall start with the conviction that good must mean so and so, and shall therefore be inclined either to misunderstand our opponent’s arguments or to cut them short with the reply, ‘This is not an open question: the very meaning of the word decides it; no one can think otherwise except through confusion.’
This conception of an open question is seemingly the same as Moore’s notion of a “significant question” utilized in the opening passages of §13:
The hypothesis that disagreement about the meaning of good is disagreement with regard to the correct analysis of a given whole, may be most plainly seen to be incorrect by consideration of the fact that, whatever definition be offered, it may be always asked, with significance, of the complex so defined, whether it is itself good.
The concept of an open question has been described in a number of very similar ways. A question is an open question iff: “it is possible for a person to understand its meaning fully without knowing the correct answer” (Feldman 1978: 202); “it is possible for someone to completely understand the question, yet not know its answer” (Horgan and Timmons 1992b: 155); “it is not answerable merely by reference to a priori, analytic truths based on the meanings of the words involved” (Gampel 1997: 148); it is possible to doubt an affirmative answer to the question (Brink 1989: 152–153); “it makes sense as something to say in a serious discussion, as an expression of genuine doubt” (Lewis 1989: 130). And Stephen Ball captures the notion of an open question in this way: “The insight of Moore’s argument is that no matter what a naturalist takes P to be, one can recognize that a given x has P and yet still reasonably ask whether x is good or morally right—that is, this remains an ‘open question’” (Ball 1988: 197).
Other commentators on Moore’s OQAs—including Moore himself in his (1993b)—have eschewed discussion of open questions altogether, preferring to work with the similar, if not identical, concept of a “significant” question (or statement) instead. Most interpretations of Moore’s “significance” involve the concept of a contradiction or a tautology. For example, the question “Are all pleasant things good?” comes out as significant according to many interpreters just in case a negative answer to the question does not imply a contradiction. This sort of employment of the notion of a significant question (or statement) in the construction of Moore’s OQAs can be found in Prior (1949): 2, Ewing (1953): 91, White (1958): 126, and Putnam (1981): 206. Hancock (1960) distinguishes three notions of significance (the second being very similar to the notion employed by the other “significance” interpreters), suggesting that none of them will serve to establish Moore’s anti-naturalist conclusions.
This argument is conceptually similar in conspicuous ways to the argument presented at the beginning of Section 7 of Feldman (2005). Feldman (2005) and I seem to differ with respect to whether this argument is in fact Moore’s; that is, whether the argument can actually be extracted from Principia Ethica. Passages at the end of §14 of Principia Ethica ground my optimism that this argument is closely aligned to the spirit of Moore’s texts. See footnote 28 above.
Feldman (2005) articulates a principle of compositionality in this way: “the meaning of a linguistic whole is a function of the meanings of its parts and the pattern of their arrangement” (32).
Moore presents an OQA against a “something we desire to desire” naturalistic analysis of intrinsic goodness in subsection (1) of §13 of Principia Ethica just prior to his presentation of the anti-hedonistic OQA.
Some interpreters suggest that Moore’s open question efforts should be interpreted in a wholly general way. Let ‘N’ be a schematic placeholder for naturalistic predicates that might be considered candidates for successful analysans in a meaning analysis of the predicate ‘x is good’. Now consider this argument schema:
- 1.
The question Are all N things N? is not open.
- 2.
The question Are all N things good? is open.
- 3.
If (1) and (2), then the question Are all N things N? differs in meaning from the question Are all N things good?.
- 4.
If the question Are all N things N? differs in meaning from the question Are all N things good?, then the meaning of the predicate ‘x is good’ cannot be successfully analyzed solely in terms of the predicate ‘x is N’.
- 5.
Therefore, the meaning of the predicate ‘x is good’ cannot be successfully analyzed solely in terms of the predicate ‘x is N’.
Some interpreters see Moore as arguing for the claim that any instance of this argument schema is sound. Feldman hints at this possibility in his 2005: 38. And Pigden (2007) uses a similar technique in a general OQA he attributes to Moore, though Pigden’s interpretation extends further metaphysically than mine, which is restricted to meanings of predicates. These metaphysical implications will be addressed soon.
Despite the confidence Moore exudes in endorsing his Open Question Thesis, I am reluctant to interpret Moore’s OQAs in this general, schematic way for a couple of reasons. First, Moore presents (at least) two specific OQAs in §13 in Principia Ethica: one directed against a “that which we desire to desire” analysis of the predicate ‘x is good’ and the one I provide above. The two arguments are different in subtle ways; see Feldman (2005). Second, Moore seems to suggest that we should employ his open question strategies on a case by case basis. In the second subsection of §13 in Principia Ethica, Moore writes:
But whoever will attentively consider with himself what is actually before his mind when he asks the question ‘Is pleasure (or whatever it may be) after all good?’ can easily satisfy himself that he is not merely wondering whether pleasure is pleasant. And if he will try this experiment with each suggested definition in succession, he may become expert enough to recognise that in every case he has before his mind a unique object, with regard to the connection of which with any other object, a distinct question may be asked.
Bryan Hutchinson shares my position here; see his (2001): 33. Also see §8 of Pigden (2007) where Pigden presents an “amended” version of an OQA in the spirit of Moore that should be “deployed piecemeal” against purely semantic versions of metaethical naturalism.
- 1.
See Moore (1968): 535–554.
See §74 of Chapter IV of Principia Ethica.
Note that my position here regarding the significance of Moore’s OQAs in his overall metaethical argumentation stretches beyond that discussed in Section 8 of Feldman (2005).
Pigden (2007) argues that Moore’s OQAs are intended to establish both a semantic and metaphysical thesis.
Cf. Kalderon (2004), who writes about Moore’s OQA that: “The immediate conclusion of the argument is that no moral predicate is synonymous with any descriptive predicate.” (269) Feldman (2005) extracts several OQAs from §13 of Principia Ethica, all of which are intended by Moore to establish conclusions about the meaning of the predicate ‘x is good’. Also see the interpretation of Moore’s OQA labeled OQc in Fumerton (1990): 71. Note also that Moore is confident that his OQA in §74 of Chapter IV of Principia Ethica is just as effective against “metaphysical” on “supernatural” interpretations of the predicate ‘x is good’ as his earlier OQAs are against naturalistic interpretations.
See footnote 2.
See footnote 4.
Hare (1952): 81–92. Contemporary philosophers use Moorean OQAs to defend metaethical quasi-realism and metaethical expressivism from naturalistic attacks; see footnote 5.
Feldman (2005) does not address this possibility.
Cf. Fumerton (1990): 72.
Note also that Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton appear to be sympathetic to Harman’s diagnosis of Moore’s metaphysical leap: they quote Harman in a sympathetic light in the opening paragraphs of their 1992. Also see Putnam (1981): 208; Sturgeon (1985): 25–26; Lycan (1988): 200f.; and the new breed of metaethical naturalists: Boyd (1988), Brink (1989), Railton (1989), and Copp (1991). Cf. Durrant (1970), who argues that Moore OQAs are arguments intended to establish that the predicate ‘x is good’ differs in meaning from purely naturalistic predicates like ‘x is pleasant’. Durrant (1970) also seems to argue that Moore uses his OQAs in a more general argument against the metaphysical component of metaethical naturalism. After presenting his interpretation of Moore’s OQA, Durrant (1970) writes: “But Moore claims more than this. He claims to have shown, not just that ‘good’ is indefinable, but that it denotes a unique property not denoted by any other expression.” (361).
Horgan and Timmons (1992b) and Gampel (1997) present arguments intending to establish that moral terms are not causally regulated by natural properties. See Baldwin (1990): 93–96 and Fumerton (2007): 234–238 for responses to these causal theory of reference objections to Moore’s metaethical argumentation. Also see Soames (2003): 47.
Eric Gampel reiterates this point in the conclusion of his interesting 1997:
We use ethical terms in non-rigid ways, taking the ordinary methods for assessing the evaluative status of acts and things, with their appeal to ordinary normative criteria, to be decisive, not intending to defer to what some other method (science) might discover about the actual samples we have found (if any). Given these prior referential intentions, the open question argument can stand as a serious challenge to ethical naturalism, despite the success of the naturalist strategy of synthetic a posteriori reduction in other areas. (161)
David Brink presents a defense of the possibility of a “direct realist” account of moral semantics consonant with a Kripke–Putman causal theory of reference in his 2001. Admitting that the referential intentions involved with our use of moral terminology differ in important ways from those involved in our use of natural kind terms, Brink sketches an account of moral semantics that that does not, contra Copp (1991), require that our use of moral terms seeks to pick out causally regulative kinds. Instead, Brink argues that the referential intentions utilized in our moral terminology might aim to pick out natural properties that would be selected by the results of dialectical reasoning in moral philosophy that eventually lead to reflective equilibrium (for speakers?) in the actual and (nearby?) counterfactual worlds. Brink’s position is a radical departure from other advocates of a direct realism semantics, and it is also controversial. Substantial argumentation would be required to establish that the concept of reflective equilibrium can do the semantic work that Brink suggests it might. Being in reflective equilibrium with respect to some moral principle does not necessarily imply the truth of that principle. Moreover, the concept of reflective equilibrium is hotly disputed. Philosophers endorse competing conceptions of reflective equilibrium and disagree about what being in reflective equilibrium with respect to some principle implies epistemically for the person in reflective equilibrium. Brink would have to admit that the meaning of reflective equilibrium is grounded in the same way that moral terms are: in terms of reflective equilibrium, for the concept of reflective equilibrium contains normative features too.
Other contemporary philosophers agree that moral predicates are not, in many respects, analogous to so-called rigidly designating natural kind predicates. Horgan and Timmons, in their 1992a and 1992b, use “Moral Twin Earth” thought experiments to pump certain semantic intuitions that cast doubt upon the claim that moral terms are analogous to natural kind terms. Horgan and Timmons also make the following interesting observation:
Also, even if one grants causal regulation of moral terms by natural properties, it is still quite contentious whether any single natural property causally regulates the use of ‘good’ for humankind in general; likewise for other moral terms. (1992b: 175)
Fred Feldman also discusses this issue in his 1978:
“This is a valid argument, but primitive hedonists may refuse to be moved by it. They may claim that (2) is false. If their view is correct, the statement that pleasure is good is analytic—that is, it is true in virtue of its meaning alone. Hence, Q[2] is not an open question. Anyone fully understanding its meaning would know the answer to be yes. Moore, and others following him, would not accept this response.” (203)
An anonymous referee interprets this passage as extending beyond a merely autobiographical claim. The referee suggests that Moore’s claim here be interpreted in a Socratic or Platonic way: Moore “is reminding us that we all do take there to be a property of goodness, which because of the demands it makes on us, we are motivated to blend it into other properties.” I am sympathetic to the referee’s interpretation, though it must be admitted that Moore himself is not entirely clear about this.
Thanks to Mark Walker for helping me in the development these responses.
Frank Snare also believes that despite the lack of justification for the important “open question” premise, Moore’s arguments are effective in undermining analytic reductions of fundamental moral terms; see his 1975.
Many commentators on Moore’s OQAs suggest that Moore employed a principle something like this: If two predicates differ in meaning, then any competent speaker who reflects upon the two predicates will be able to recognize this. Moore does not mention anything about “every competent speaker” in his open question passages. Furthermore, many—if not most—competent speakers lack philosophical sophistication, including sophistication regarding the nature of morality and the meanings of moral terms. Moore’s synonymy test should be reserved for a philosophically sophisticated (to some extent) subset of competent speakers.
Moore eventually comes to reject the view that ought is capable of being defined in terms of intrinsically good or intrinsically better. See his 1968: 610–11.
This may be another place where I diverge from Feldman (2005), who suggests that Moore’s OQAs are effective in establishing their conclusions when he writes: “Even some of the most ardent critics of OQA apparently are willing to admit that it succeeds at the job it was designed to perform.” (40) And what job is that? Feldman (2005) writes: “[Moore] wanted to insist that you can’t derive substantive conclusions in axiology from claims about the synonymy of ‘good’ with some other expression (especially if the other expression was either naturalistic or complex.)” (40) I think Moore succeeds on the synonym front. But I do not believe that Moore succeeds in establishing a conceptually nearby claim: that interesting, robust analytic relationships cannot hold between moral predicates like ‘x is good’ and purely naturalistic (or descriptive) predicates.
Cf. Soames (2003): 54–62.
Also see Horgan and Timmons (1992b): 170.
Again, see Durrant (1970).
Thanks to Mark Walker for bringing this to my attention.
See the early chapters of Putnam (1981).
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Acknowledgments
I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Fred Feldman. This essay is a descendant of the first three chapters of my dissertation, which Fred Feldman directed. Fred provided critical commentaries for draft after draft of these chapters. He made substantial suggestions regarding how I might proceed in many instances. In others, he suggested potential lines of inquiry and argumentation I might pursue. No one has contributed more to my understanding of Moore’s OQAs and their relevance to the metaethical dialectic than Fred Feldman has. I am also tremendously grateful for the assistance, support, and encouragement provided by my colleague Mark Walker. Mark studied many drafts of this essay, providing rich commentaries and trenchant criticisms for each draft. Several of the argumentative strategies pursued in the essay are Mark’s makings. Thanks to Robert Gressis for a thoughtful commentary on an early draft of the essay. Thanks to audiences at colloquia at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association and the 2008 Annual Meetings of the New Mexico-Texas Philosophical Society. And thanks to three anonymous referees for their critical commentaries and encouragement.
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Vessel, JP. Moore’s Open Question Maneuvering: A Qualified Defense. J Ethics 24, 91–117 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-019-09311-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-019-09311-4